In the world of Jewish day schools and camps, the schedule almost always includes time set aside for tefillah (prayer). Yet few educators feel that we do tefillah well, or that our students find the experience engaging or meaningful. We keep it in our schedules out of a sense of obligation or even definition – how can you have a Jewish school without tefillah? — but it often feels compulsory, something to tolerate and get through. As a result, school and camp tefillah can leave both children and educators with strong negative associations. 

Doing tefillah well is hard. It is hard to engage meaningfully on a daily basis, both for those fully committed to traditional practice and for those who are less traditional; and it is especially hard for teenagers, who love to challenge authority, are often quite definite about what they do or do not believe and resist engaging in rituals whose texts do not reflect their beliefs. 

Some have responded by giving “prayerfulness” a very broad definition, expanding it to encompass many non-traditional activities that are spiritual or reflective. Whether they rename it to reflect this shift or simply define the term tefillah more loosely, these are genuine attempts to offer experiences that will feel more engaging and productive than simply asking students to sit through the traditional liturgy. These alternatives start from the premise that, for most students, traditional ritual is in essence unsalvageable.

We can and must do more. Tefillah is often the largest single component of a school or camp’s Judaic curriculum, and in practice the skill most critical to enabling students to participate in communal Jewish life as adults. And in a cultural moment when so many kids feel untethered, Jewish educators have an opportunity to show that Judaism offers a living practice for cultivating meaning, reflection and communal belonging, helping students learn to live in relationship with self, others and God. What we need is to treat tefillah as a core part of our wellness and character-education strategy — a space where students build the habits of gratitude, empathy and perspective that underpin mental health and moral growth. It can be infused with joy, support students’ emotional growth and be a source of positive connection to Jewish practice. We can and should think about how to make tefillah more engaging, and we should be creative about how we structure tefillah spaces, but we cannot afford to give up on teaching our students the skills and understandings that will enable them to engage meaningfully with the traditional liturgy. 

We need models of programmatic success, images of how these rituals could feel substantively different. We need to start thinking strategically and long term about tefillah as a pedagogic area with definable goals. To do that, we cannot let tefillah be the lowest priority both for administrators who prioritize academics and extra-curriculars and for faculty and staff who are focused on their main teaching responsibilities. Tefillah is usually an added and sometimes unwanted obligation, one that rarely gets the careful preparation that goes into classes and programs. It is also an area where many educators feel that they lack the necessary expertise and feel uncomfortable or fraudulent serving as tefillah educators. 

That means it has to be a higher priority for funders also. There are models of real success, and organizations that have done valuable research on what works in various contexts. We need to share these resources much more widely and give schools the support to enable and encourage them to devote real energy to tefillah. 

Educators need a road map for success. What should we be striving for? How do we get there? Beyond lesson plans on specific texts, what does transformation look like? Without a clear path forward and a vision of the alternative we might hope to build, and with many more pressing priorities, tefillah is often left to run on auto-pilot, perpetuating its failures and reinforcing the sense that it could not be otherwise. Each school’s needs are different, but here are a few common elements for getting started:

1.) Appoint a spiritual guide, a madrich ruchani

Just as curriculum directors oversee Hebrew, math, or science, someone should have responsibility for the spiritual life of the school. This role should not be about micromanaging prayer services but about laying out a vision for an institution-wide prayer culture and helping guide educators toward that vision. It also means giving room to experiment and rethink set patterns, and the resources — in time and personnel — to work with teachers to build it.

2.) Develop a spiraling spiritual curriculum

In the same way we scaffold Hebrew or Judaics, we should scaffold students’ experience of tefillah. This means developing a spiraling curriculum — one that grows incrementally, helping students move from participation to leadership, from imitation to authenticity. Younger students may focus on melodies and core prayers; middle schoolers can explore meaning and emotion; high schoolers can take ownership, experimenting with different modes of prayer and reflection.

Lay out incremental benchmarks by grade and a progression of both prayer skills and spiritual literacy. Use existing resources like those from the Hadar Institute or the Pardes Institute and tailor them to the needs of your community. Then make sure your precious tefillah time is being used to work toward those outcomes. This makes tefillah not a static ritual but a developmental journey, one where students can look back with pride and see how they have grown.

3.) Build the culture through training for both faculty and students

Transforming tefillah begins with faculty. Students can sense when educators themselves feel uncomfortable or disconnected. Faculty training around tefillah must be guided by self-awareness, empathy and a spirit of shared exploration. It should give educators the space to explore their own prayer lives and to start seeing themselves as authentic and capable tefillah educators. 

It could include, for example: 

• Storytelling and reflection: Sharing personal prayer journeys (with each other and with students) to help normalize struggle and foster authenticity
• Practical skills: Learning techniques for leading singing, projecting presence, and guiding quiet moments
• Student perspective: Understanding how tefillah looks and feels from a student’s seat — including discomfort or boredom — and how to respond with empathy rather than frustration
• Collaborative envisioning: Defining what great tefillah looks like for your school community, and setting realistic goals for growth

Equally important is actively training and supporting student leadership. Giving kids agency is essential to getting their buy-in to this process, and their voices are critical to creating a robust and energized tefillah space. Look at ways to both recruit and train student leaders, then give them real opportunities to lead. From leading to planning services, students should play real roles. Administrators can support this by giving space, feedback and resources (song libraries, rehearsal time, mentoring by older students).

4.) Assess and iterate

Stanford University’s Life Design Lab applies the principles of Design Thinking: What gets measured gets improved. Use periodic qualitative and quantitative feedback: ask students and faculty what worked, what felt forced, what shifts they’d like. Hold “reflection days” where the community discusses the emotional contour of prayer experiences. Use feedback loops to refine goals, adjust pacing and cultivate shared language about tefillah culture. Invite the input of local clergy, both to get an outside viewpoint and to get them invested in the process and the school’s work. 

It is time for schools, educational networks and philanthropists to invest seriously in a pedagogy of prayer. Tefillah can be a key piece of our educational work: it can be a setting both to develop traditional skills and to use them to help us make meaning in our lives. It can nourish kids’ emotional and spiritual growth and can be a key component of the vital work of cultivating inner peace and strength. It can also shape their feelings about their overall school or camp experience and about Jewish practice more broadly in profoundly positive ways. 

But to get there, we need a serious push to develop and provide widely the training and resources schools and camps need. Once leaders believe that tefillah can be done well, they might invest real time and resources in thinking about how to get there. Then they can stop seeing their tefillah programs as limited to what has been and instead start asking what is possible. 

Rabbi Joshua Cahan is a tefillah consultant and creator of the Yedid Nefesh Bencher and Yedid Nefesh Haggadah. He was previously tefillah chair at The Leffell High School in Westchester, N.Y.